WINNERS AND LOSERS: THE BALANCE SHEET OF EMPIRE 179
pecially pertinent. It is no coincidence that the French crown, always
ready and willing to honor socially ambitious bourgeois (typically men
of law) with patents of nobility—for a price, of course—began in the
seventeenth century to permit noblemen to engage in wholesale (as
opposed to retail) trade; and in the eighteenth century to impose on
aspirants from industry a condition of continuity. The newly ennobled
négociant or fabricantwas required to remain "in trade"—a condition
that would once have been perceived as inherendy déshonorante, in
compatible with such exalted status.^21 The problem, as a good Calvin
ist would have seen it, was that honors and pretensions ill became men
of the countinghouse and fabrique. They worked better and harder
dressed in dark woolen cloth, without silk, lace, and wig.
However important this proliferation of a new business breed, it was
only one aspect of shifting economic power and wealth from South to
North. Not only money moved, but knowledge as well; and it was
knowledge, specifically scientific knowledge, that dictated economic
possibilities. In the centuries before the Reformation, southern Europe
was a center of learning and intellectual inquiry: Spain and Portugal,
because they were on the frontier of Christian and Islamic civilization
and had the benefit of Jewish intermediaries; and Italy, which had its
own contacts. Spain and Portugal lost out early, because religious pas
sion and military crusade drove away the outsiders (Jews and then the
conversos) and discouraged the pursuit of the strange and potentially
heretical; but Italy continued to produce some of Europe's leading
mathematicians and scientists. It was not an accident that the first
learned society (the Accadémia dei Lincei, Rome, 1603) was founded
there.*
The Protestant Reformation, however, changed the rules. It gave a
big boost to literacy, spawned dissents and heresies, and promoted the
skepticism and refusal of authority that is at the heart of the scientific
endeavor. The Catholic countries, instead of meeting the challenge, re
sponded by closure and censure. The reaction in the Habsburg do
minions, which included the Low Countries, followed hard on the
heels of Luther's denunciation. The presence there of Marrano
refugees, feared and hated as enemies of the true Church and accused
of deliberately propagating the new doctrines, aggravated the hysteria.
A rain of interdictions followed (from 1521 on), not only of pub
lishing but of reading heresy, in any language. The Spanish authorities,
* Lincei = lynxes. The animal was chosen for its reputedly keen sight.